Trolls

 Amiga 1200, Trolls (1993) game

This must be about the easiest Amiga game to complete I've ever played! I was very surprised it only took me three sessions, a smattering of hours to complete every level and hit the big wooden door at the end expecting 'the final challenge' mentioned in the manual. All I got was a 'Congratulations' screen. An admittedly bright and attractive piece of artwork, very Hobbity, maybe even a touch 'Settlers,' but still... I was anticipating at least one last partial level, maybe a difficult boss battle, something to increase the chances of dying and having to play through all the levels again. But no, unless I'm missing something, that's it, you get seven levels of mostly well-worn themes (Toyland! Candyland! Fairground Land!), with the toughest challenge in the game being thumbing through the manual and counting down the lines of text on a given page to find the correct word for inputting to satisfy the copy protection... That's another thing, I couldn't copy the disks, they come up as NDOS, meaning not a DOS disk and therefore Workbench, the Amiga operating system, won't let you copy them. I'm always wary of using original disks, especially today, so long after they were manufactured, so I went into this game with the mental caveat I might not be able to finish it, reliant on the disks holding out. I needn't have worried, the game didn't last long enough for me to experience any issues like that, and I can't say I'd have been disappointed if it had, other than for the sake of completeness.

Actually, I did experience some issues like that: the game was a bit glitchy - I understand, as I said, it's very old and a wonder it even still works (they used to make things to last back then!), but I did once get stuck in the scenery with only the relief of a nearby monster moth killing me to prevent me having to restart from the beginning (the manual claims you can restart by pressing F2, or quit with ESC, but neither of those options worked, so maybe that was referring to the PC version only?), and that was only in a few hours of play. The worst glitch was when the Bonus levels for each world, doorways with spinning question marks only accessible when a world has been completed, would crash the game if you tried to enter them (on a side note: are these Worlds or Levels, because the manual calls them Level Doors, but then mentions how 'you can see a silhouette of the World you will enter through that door' and later calls them 'Multi-Level Worlds' - I just like to get the terminology right in a game. And don't get me started on the weird choice not to have the name over the door, but to have to guess from the silhouette what level/world you're about to enter!). Oddly, the Bonus (or Bogus, depending on which of the B-O-N(or G)-U-S letters you collected), levels that automatically loaded up after a successful completion of a level with all letters collected, worked fine, so I don't understand what the problem was?

Let's tally up so far: extremely short, confusing, options that don't work, glitches... It's not that I went in with high expectations, I was fully anticipating a basic 2-star average joe of a game, and now that I've played it I feel bad for having marked 'Sleepwalker' and 'Magic Pockets' down to that last year when they were more inventive or a far more energising challenge (though it was for specific reasons: the glitchy end of the former, the hard graft for the latter). I selected 'Trolls' as my big Amiga title this year simply due to the fact it was about the only platform game I could find in our collection that worked, worked on the 1200, and was a platformer, as I wanted to recreate the fun of the last couple of years where I've rediscovered the genre on the console. In truth I really wanted to play the James Pond games (especially Robocod), but couldn't locate them. I had absolutely no connection to 'Trolls' whatsoever, having never played it back in the day (I don't even know what 'era' we got it in, I imagine it was among one of the later batches of collections that came our way). There are some titles I'd love to play: 'Fire and Ice' (begun, then forcibly abandoned due to the 1500 dying), 'Soccer Kid' (where are the disks?), 'Zool' (doesn't work on the 1200, or maybe just doesn't work), but 'Trolls' had to suffice and just shows what a gap there is between the greats and the also-rans of the genre.

I will give it credit for a cheery little intro sequence as if all the energy and time went on that to sell the game, a jaunty theme, and even game credits (which is why I suppose they're missing at the end). Then you have a colourful image of the titular Troll and some of his enemies before the game starts properly. I will also give credit for allowing the player to tackle the seven Worlds in any order he likes: once I'd got a handle on how the game played, what the various collectables meant, and explored the levels, it made sense to start with the last one, 'Candyland,' and work backwards since the difficulty was slightly upped with the later ones, as is the norm for these things. Not that there was ever much real difficulty, it's far from taxing for any experienced platformer veteran and even with the slight impression of an unresponsive control scheme, you can win through quickly - you're helped by the occasional hidden warping area that if jumped into will deliver you to the end of the level, bypassing all the threats, the main ones being falling off the bottom of the screen since you get three hearts to start with, and space for a fourth to be filled, three lives (falling off uses one), and maybe four continues? Find a 'Super Cool White Rabbit' and it adds another continue, score 5000 points and get another life... Even if you die the number of Baby Trolls collected is held over so you don't have to pick them up again, so there are a lot of helping hands - if you're careful and don't go bouncing off the screen too much, you can get through with minimal losses.

It can get confusing over what you can and can't do - early on I wasn't sure if I was losing a heart every time I bounced on a monster, or not (you have to hit them directly from above or you suffer damage). And when I collected various items I'd often see no change in the score, so does it wait for the end of level screen to award the points? I think so, but then some things do give you points there and then, like the essential Baby Trolls (a number of which you have to rescue before heading for the 'Pigstop' - it's a flying pig, the 'Pigasus,' rather than a bus for reasons of game creator whimsy, though I do wish they'd put a little more thought into Troll culture, if that doesn't sound too pretentious, and worked the worlds around that, rather than just flinging in the usual environmental features and creatures you'd expect), of which you have to collect a certain number in each level, so it didn't seem to be very consistent. To make it even easier there are 'Big Red Elephants' (which look a bit like Welephant, the fire safety mascot, if you remember him!), which will mark your position in a level so if you lose a life you'll jump to him instead of starting at the beginning. They were nothing if not generous, but maybe this was the dawn of games becoming easier since they were cottoning on to the fact that players will be more likely to buy your game if they can actually do well in it.

Some minor irritations are that you collect items hidden in balloons by hitting the balloon, but then have to wait for the item to jump into the air and come back down, and if you move from that spot, you'll miss it. It had the effect of slowing the game down because instead of bouncing madly round screens as you would in most games of this style, you have to wait, or at least leap into the air in a direct line above you, to ensure you collect the points, and when you have enemies approaching, that's not always possible. Even more so when you're in the Bonus/Bogus levels (the difference between them being that you double the points collected if you play a Bogus level, but lose all, including a life, if you fail to get to the exit in time), where you have a strict time limit in which to explore and gather up as many points as possible, while still making it to the Elephant-shaped Exit before the time runs out. I never saw any correspondence between the balloon's colour and what it contained, either, so you don't know if something's worth waiting for until you hit the balloon and play close attention to what flies out of it. Then there are the enemies that all reappear the moment you come back into their area after stepping away, even if you've dispatched them! The Troll's hair changing colour depending on what Special Power he gets was a nice touch (that's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say 'Troll culture' - expand on that!), but a couple of them are negative effects (Ball & Chain slowing you down, Beer making movements unresponsive - realistic, but is this really suitable for a game aimed at children!), so there's a bit of penalising the player for the sake of it.

To cap it all, I wasn't able to note down my score (153,000, or thereabouts? I'm not sure), at the very end because unlike every other level door, you don't need to press down on the Joystick to access the final wooden door, just touch it, which was a final annoyance since when the 'Congratulations' message comes up that's it, there's no way back, no saving, nothing, you have to reset the Amiga to exit, how annoying is that! In gameplay terms it was pleasant enough, though disappointing you only get music in the Toymaker's Shelves hub (the Toymaker himself seems to be a dog for some reason...), or the Bonus/Bogus levels, though sound effects were attractive enough, as were the visuals. 'Fableland' with its rolling green hills and little Hobbit dwellings in the hillside, was probably the best looking. 'Candyland' just seems like a complete rip-off of 'Zool,' though I suppose 'Media Land' was trying something different with its largely black and white landscape and amusing giant-sized Troll-related headlines. You've got to have the obligatory underwater levels with Sodapop Land (with added jeopardy thanks to the need to reset oxygen before it depletes by collecting bubbles from balloons, though again you have no idea which balloons hold them!), so where was the 'Space Land' where you jump higher or fly in zero-gravity? The Yo-Yo was a fun addition, allowing you to swing from platforms and even jump up to higher ones, but it could be fiddly to use (press fire and the direction you want to throw it, but if you get it wrong you'll end up running in that direction and hitting an enemy with your body, taking damage instead of damaging the foe - argh!), and should have been standard equipment rather than something you had to track down every level (and lose every time you die, sometimes stifling your progress).

Maybe I was expecting too much, but I don't think so, I think 'Trolls' just comes across as a bit of a rush job and even the artwork on the box looks quite amateurish. Translated into the digital environments it's a lush, happy funscape, but when you're even feeling inclined to be critical of the product's box and manual you can't help but feel that there's something fundamentally wrong with it! Not really true, I did get some enjoyment, but it was very far from being a challenge and when you've steeled yourself to battle through seven levels and an eighth final challenge, probably taking a good few weeks of teeth-grindingly repetitive effort, to complete it so quickly makes me feel like I've been let out of work halfway through the shift and don't know what to do with the rest of my day.

**